They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. “Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.” In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life.

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.

Atlas shrugged